Distributing the Future August 28, 2006: "Ownership"

0:50
Who owns your stuff?

The total value of what I own has gone up quite a bit in the last decade -- though the weight has not increased that much.
This metric is useful: it pushes us to realize that more of our possessions, and more of what we offer the world, cannot be packaged and shipped off somewhere the way they used to. Our notions of how best to protect our stuff have also changed.
(1:31)

2:21
Technology Trends

Roger Magoulas, head of O'Reilly research, looks at recent technology trends. He explains that he looks at a lot of different facets of the market: book sales, job listings, geographic data, and various tags.
(6:39)

9:00The Rising Tide of IP

Next up, we offer excerpts from a talk by Irwin Gross called "The Rising Tide of Intellectual Property and the Need for a New Marketplace for Rights." Goss tracks the increase in creative output and considers what we need to do to enable its growth and regulation. Pam Samuelson, who teaches at Berkeley Law, follows up with a question.
(10:33)

19:33Sharing Data

There's been a bit of a controversy surrounding Flickr's APIs. What if a company created a business out of collecting all of the Share Alike photos from Flickr and offering them up on a DVD? What about another company that takes advantage of Flickr's APIs to let you move your own photos from Flickr to its service? The answers that emerge from this conversation between Tim O'Reilly and Yahoo's Chad Dickerson might not be what you'd expect.
The issue is fair commercial and non-commercial use of the Flickr APIs. Chad explains.
(9:10)

Total running time:29:20

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Production Notes

The initial montage is from Tim O'Reilly, recorded at OSCON '04 in a phone interview with Doug Kaye of IT Conversations, and used with permission. "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet" is a quote from author William Gibson that Tim used with attribution.

Daniel H. Steinberg
is the editor for the new series of Mac Developer titles for the Pragmatic Programmers. He writes feature articles for Apple's ADC web site and is a regular contributor to Mac Devcenter. He has presented at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, MacWorld, MacHack and other Mac developer conferences.